I work for Red Hat, where I lead JBoss technical direction and research/development. Prior to this I was SOA Technical Development Manager and Director of Standards. I was Chief Architect and co-founder at Arjuna Technologies, an HP spin-off (where I was a Distinguished Engineer). I've been working in the area of reliable distributed systems since the mid-80's. My PhD was on fault-tolerant distributed systems, replication and transactions. I'm also a Professor at Newcastle University and Lyon.

Saturday, October 15, 2016

Architecture First

We've all heard the story of The Three Little Pigs. We all know that building houses from straw isn't a great idea if your use case is to survive a wolf's breath. We all know that sticks aren't that much better either. Of course brick is a far better medium and the pig that built from it survived. Now what the original story doesn't say, probably because it's a little more detail than children really need to understand, is that before building their houses all of the pigs went to architecture school and studied at length about arches, the truss, stylobates and other things necessary to design and then construct buildings from various materials. Now it's likely the pig that used straw didn't listen when they were talking about the tensile strength of straw and the pig that used sticks ignored the warnings that they're really only good for building forest dens (or birds nests). But if they'd been listening as much as their brother then they'd have known to give him a hand with the bricks and not waste their time.

Now even the best architects make mistakes. It's not possible to suggest a single reason for these though. Sometimes it's because the architect didn't understand the physical properties of the material being used (a bit like the straw and stick pigs). Sometimes it's because they didn't fully understand the environment within which their building would reside. But fortunately for us, the vast majority of buildings are successful and we feel safe to be within them or around them.

You may be wondering why I'm talking about architecture here. I think I've mentioned this before but my biggest worry about the rush towards microservices is the lack of focus, or discussions, around architectures. I'm sure many of the established groups that have been building systems with services (micro or not) understand their architectures and the impact service-orientation has on it, or vice versa. But I'm also convinced that many groups and individuals who are enamoured by the lustre of microservices aren't considering architectures or the implications. That worries me because, as I said at the JavaOne 2016 presentation I gave recently, launching into developing with microservices without understanding their implications and the architecture is neither going to solve any architecture problems you may have with your existing application nor will it result in a good/efficient distributed system. In fact it's probably the worst thing you could do!

Even if you've got "pizza teams", have a culture that has embraced DevOps, have fantastic tools supporting CI and CD, if you don't understand your current and new architecture none of this is really going to help you. That's not to suggest those things aren't important after you've done your architecture design and reviews because they clearly are. The better they are the quicker and more reliably you can build your new application using microservices and manage it afterwards. But you should never start such an effort just because you've got the right tools, building blocks and support infrastructure. It could be argued that they're necessary, but they most certainly aren't sufficient. It needs to start with architecture.

Update: I should also have mentioned that after any architecture review you find that you don't need many, or any, microservices then you shouldn't feel a sense of failure. A good architect (software or not) knows when to use and when not to use things. Remember, it's quite probable the pig who used the bricks considered straw and sticks first but decided they just weren't right this time around.